Css – Font Awesome fonts show up as boxes on IE8

cssfont-awesomeinternet explorerwebfonts

So I am using Font Awesome in a project and in testing I'm running into issues with IE8.

On Windows IE9, Chrome and Firefox show the font properly (As does Firefox, Chrome and Safari on OS X) but IE8 on Windows has a problem where I get a box in place of the font.

enter image description here

My code is:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<!--[if lt IE 7 ]><html class="ie ie6" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7 ]><html class="ie ie7" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8 ]><html class="ie ie8" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if (gte IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--><html lang="en"> <!--<![endif]-->

<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>Site title</title>

    <!--[if lt IE 9]>
        <script src="https://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
    <![endif]-->

    <link href=".../css/css.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
    <link href="../css/print.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print">

    <link href="../apple-touch-icon.png" rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed">
    <link href="../css/jquery-ui-1.8.23.custom.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
    <link href="../css/jquery-ui-overrider.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
    <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato|Michroma&subset=latin&v2" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
    <link href="../css/prettify.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
    <link href="../css/font-awesome.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
    <!--[if IE 7]>
        <link href="../css/font-awesome-ie7.css" rel="stylesheet">
    <![endif]-->

I have the four font files…

fontawesome-webfont.eot
fontawesome-webfont.svg
fontawesome-webfont.ttf
fontawesome-webfont.woff

…where they belong and they are readable by the world (755 permissions).
What am I missing? Do I have to do something with compatibility view in IE8?

The same computer views the fonts on the Font Awesome site just fine so it has to be something I'm doing wrong.

As requested, a copy of font-awesome.css is here: font-awesome.css. It is more or less what I downloaded from them with the exception of the path to the font files.

Based on @Abody97 I added https://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js into the mix (Code above has been updated). Still no luck, even after a refresh and a delete cache refresh.

Best Answer

I had the same problem and found a solution, I'll post it here in case anyone still needs it.

The problem was that IE failed to load the font files, it was constructing weird GET requests that returned 404 errors.

Using the trick found here: http://www.fontspring.com/blog/fixing-ie9-font-face-problems I was able to fix the issue.

Add ?#iefix to the eot url in the CSS that contains the font-face (in this case font-awesome.css)

@font-face {
font-family: 'MyWebFont';
src: url('webfont.eot'); /* IE9 Compat Modes */
src: url('webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'), /* IE6-IE8 */
     url('webfont.woff') format('woff'), /* Modern Browsers */
     url('webfont.ttf')  format('truetype'), /* Safari, Android, iOS */
     url('webfont.svg#svgFontName') format('svg'); /* Legacy iOS */
}

Related Solutions

Including Google Fonts link or import

For 90%+ of the cases you likely want the <link> tag. As a rule of thumb, you want to avoid @import rules because they defer the loading of the included resource until the file is fetched.. and if you have a build process which "flattens" the @import's, then you create another problem with web fonts: dynamic providers like Google WebFonts serve platform-specific versions of the fonts, so if you simply inline the content, then you'll end up with broken fonts on some platforms.

Now, why would you use the web font loader? If you need complete control over how the fonts are loaded. Most browsers will defer painting the content to the screen until all of the CSS is downloaded and applied - this avoids the "flash of unstyled content" problem. The downside is.. you may have an extra pause and delay until the content is visible. With the JS loader, you can define how and when the fonts become visible.. for example, you can even fade them in after the original content is painted on the screen.

Once again, the 90% case is the <link> tag: use a good CDN and the fonts will come down quick and even more likely, be served out of the cache.

For more info, and an in-depth look at Google Web Fonts, check out this GDL video

Css – Use Font Awesome Icons in CSS

You can't use text as a background image, but you can use the :before or :after pseudo classes to place a text character where you want it, without having to add all kinds of messy extra mark-up.

Be sure to set position:relative on your actual text wrapper for the positioning to work.

.mytextwithicon {
    position:relative;
}    
.mytextwithicon:before {
    content: "\25AE";  /* this is your text. You can also use UTF-8 character codes as I do here */
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    left:-5px;
    position:absolute;
    top:0;
 }

EDIT:

Font Awesome v5 uses other font names than older versions:

For FontAwesome v5, Free Version, use: font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free"
For FontAwesome v5, Pro Version, use: font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Pro"

Note that you should set the same font-weight property, too (seems to be 900).

Another way to find the font name is to right click on a sample font awesome icon on your page and get the font name (same way the utf-8 icon code can be found, but note that you can find it out on :before).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Including Google Fonts link or import

Css – Use Font Awesome Icons in CSS

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